Kindness Unseen

The face was there all along, but no one knew. When Sir Joshua Reynolds painted The Death of Cardinal Beaufort in 1789, he put a demon’s face in the darkness behind the dying man. Reynolds was accurately depicting a scene from a Shakespearean play that mentions the presence of a “busy, meddling fiend,” but some didn’t like his literalism. After Reynolds’ death in 1792, the face was painted over and forgotten. Art conservation work recently revealed it under layers o